The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - "Lake America"? What's Happening to Canada-U.S. Relations?

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

From tariffs and annexation rhetoric to "Lake America" appearing on digital maps, Canada-U.S. relations are facing new strains. What does the renaming of Lake Ontario say about Canada's digital sovereignty? And as political, economic, and cultural tensions grow, are Canadian leaders responding effectively to a rapidly changing relationship with our closest ally? Host Jeyan Jeganathan discusses the state of Canada-U.S. relations with John Michael McGrath, Globe and Mail feature writer Shannon Proudfoot, and essayist and cultural commentator Stephen Marche. Editorial,credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images NewsDonate Today : https://tvo.me/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Slash Calendar 2027. And make every month a little more inspiring. Look, we are used to being one of the United States's closest allies and largest trading partners. Then came President Donald Trump. He's repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and he's convinced we're taking advantage of America. Canada's been ripping us off for a long time on trade. So, did our recent trade talks go well? As you're probably already aware, that's a definite no.

They collapsed at the last minute. And according to Carney, the U.S. quote asked too much and offered too little. Now, we've got more U.S. tariffs on Canada and the Canadian counter tariffs that took effect just this week. Oh, and the trade war also triggered a war of words over a lake, and it's pretty close to home. changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately to Lake America. No surprise, Ontarians aren't willing to play along. Premier Doug Ford literally spelled it out. So does Trump's name change matter?

And what does all this mean for our relationship with the states? We dig into how much it's changed and whether it'll ever recover. I'm Jan Jagdonaldon. Welcome to the rundown. This is part of a broader playbook that Trump is used. using to kind of reshape our sense of reality in a sense. So my name is Ruben Rose Redwood, and I'm a professor of geography at the University of Victoria,

and my research looks at the politics of place naming and cultural landscape studies. The conventional process of renaming geographic places in the United States is that there's the US Board on Geographic Names. They have a domestic and in a foreign names committees, and they consider proposals, anyone in fact can submit a proposal to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. It goes

through an extensive consultation process and multiple levels. If it's an international geographic feature, it would then go to the Geographic Names Board, in this case of Canada as well. We saw this with the naming of the Salish Sea back in 2009, where the two countries worked together, both at state, provincial, and national levels to rename an international water body at the border. Trump has thrown all of that out the window, essentially. Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario is certainly an effort to rage bait and troll Canadians, as well as distract Americans from the rising cost of living, gas prices, groceries, and so on. That's all true.

But at the same time, you know, place naming plays a central role in shaping our geographical imaginations. And so there's a lot of power there in what we call different places. President Trump isn't the only one who's renamed our lake. Users in America will also see Lake America on Apple and Google Maps, and that's raising some big questions about digital sovereignty. To help us make sense of it all, we have brought in our resident nerd, John Michael McGrath, call on this for TVO.org, co-host of the OnPoly Podcast. Now, the other day, you wrote an article for TVO today that got a pretty strong response. Break it down for people who have not read it. Shame on them, but they haven't. We have President Donald Trump calling Lake Ontario, Lake America now.

But tech companies, what do they have to do with this? Right. So both Google and Apple, they run their different map applications, and they both adopted this Lake America naming in the United States. It just says Lake America. And in Canada, it says Lake Ontario. And then in the rest of the world, these companies are treating this as like a genuine naming dispute and putting both names up on their maps.

And I wrote that this is both an act of cowardice, but also a really good illustration of why Canadian governments and policymakers should understand that we really are vulnerable to decisions made by very powerful companies outside of our jurisdiction. It should be said that in a weird way, a precedent was already set in the sense, with the Gulf of Mexico. Correct?

This is the same thing that we have seen when President Trump announced that he wanted to change that. Yes. And so, as I said in the article that I wrote, you know, I don't think this is more or less offensive

than the change in name to the Gulf of Mexico, but I'm not paid to write about the Gulf of Mexico. You know, the way these tech companies justify this change is that, you know, they're not the ones making it. They say that, you know, if the name gets changed on the U.S.-based server

that they are drawing these names from, then their software just automatically reflects that name change. You know, that might have been a defensible argument in 2024. I think it stopped being defensible in 2025. And it is, I think, totally indefensible today. Why? Because you've had 18 months to deal with the fact that Donald Trump is very clearly

abusing their dependence on this U.S. server. Since the trade war started, experts have argued that Canada needs to focus on digital sovereignty. At the end of the day, this is what that conversation is, whether it's about Lake Ontario or Lake America, that's what we're really here to talk about. Does Apple or Google or whoever's changing the name on maps for some users, does that move help make this case? What is also the landscape here in Canada when it comes to digital sovereignty? Right. So, you know, this would not be the first time in history that a relatively important substantial issue was illuminated by something that is in itself actually kind of trivial.

I don't think anybody is really angry in a meaningful way about this change on the maps. But it does illustrate this problem that just as a for example, you know, if you use an Android phone or an iPhone, it is constantly hoovering up personal information about you. And that information is getting sent to U.S.-based servers. And no matter what the government of Canada or the government of Ontario says today, they really have no means of defending Canadians from being spied upon. We also have very limited means if, for example, if the government of Canada wants to use any, particularly if we want to talk about AI services, if they want to use it,

but really any of these American-based software companies, the current law of the United States is that any American company has to provide data that is lawfully requested by a U.S. law enforcement agency, and that includes some of the less savory ones we've seen during the Trump administration, they have to provide that data, no matter where on earth, that data actually resides. So if Microsoft is served a warrant by the U.S. government, it does not matter that, you know, our work emails are here on a server in Ontario. Microsoft has to be able to get that data and provide it to the U.S. government. There seems like an easy, easy solution here is to create a Canadian company that does exactly what, you know, Microsoft or Google does.

That seems a bit difficult. Is that the only solution on the table here when we talk about potential policy changes in terms of dealing with digital sovereignty? So I think this is going to be the big struggle for many, many governments, basically everybody except the United States in the years to come. because the Trump administration, and particularly the second Trump administration, really has been a wake-up call for a lot of governments around the world. And you are seeing moves in the European Union, for example, to really build out the whole stack of software services that they currently rely on, you know, from U.S. companies.

They are looking to build European and, in some cases, publicly owned, publicly maintained alternatives to those American services. So, you know, this could be as simple as, you know, finding an alternative to Microsoft Office. And, of course, those alternatives do exist. But, you know, some of this stuff is genuinely more difficult, right? Like, you have to build the data centers in your country that you can exercise legal control over. How do people feel about data centers at the moment? I mean, you've probably seen some of the reporting from Hamilton as well, right?

But it's not just Hamilton by any means here in Ontario. and we've definitely seen reactions against data centers. And it's a lot of the criticism of data centers have not been mollified at all by the argument that we need this for digital sovereignty. Some of their proponents have tried that. They try that in Hamilton. It was not received well. Okay. John Michael, we are going to leave it there.

Just for the record, I am going to say that I did have an internal gasp when I did see Lake America. I just want to put that out there. Thank you again. Really appreciate it. Help us break down all of this. Thank you so much. Canada and the States have been longtime friends and allies with close economic, cultural, and personal ties. Now, thanks to annexation threats and trade wars and Lake America, we are in uncharted territory. Are Canadian leaders meeting the moment? And will we ever go back to the way things were? Stephen Marsh, Shannon Proudfoot, Andrew McDougall.

Great to have you on the rundown. Thank you so much. Let's start with how Canadian leaders have been tackling the trade war with the United States. The Prime Minister walked away from a deal he said was unfair. And Premier Doug Ford has said some things. Well, have a listen. No, I don't respond to a dictator like President Trump, bully like President Trump. We've got dictator.

We've got bully. Shannon, you've written about the Trump administration for the Globe and Mail. Are Canadian politicians taking the right approach when it comes to dealing with this U.S. President? I notice you didn't use the clip of the even more colorful thing where Doug Ford instructed Donald Trump to kiss a certain caboose. He did kind of wind that back a little bit the next day. But you've definitely had a kind of good cop, bad cop routine going between until,

I guess a couple of weeks ago between Doug Ford and Mark Carney, where we sort of had this more measured tone from the federal politicians led by the prime minister. And Doug Ford was really enjoying Doug Fording as hard as he possibly could, which is being very foxy, being very outspoken. It was really working for him, even though his approval ratings are really low. But to me, I'm a hard time kind of calibrating talking about this because so much flipped on that final tariff deadline day, right? We had the Tuesday one. It was punched until Friday. And when normal people on Eastern Time went to bed on that Friday night. I remember all the news that was flowing across our homepage was about the conciliations that

Canada was going to make, like sort of the limitations we were going to eat to make this deal. And then we woke up on Saturday morning to find that the Canadian government had walked away. And I think there's been a seismic shift in that moment that morning when Mr. Carney delivered that press conference on the Saturday morning of Tragically Hip Day, which is poetic. I couldn't write. I couldn't script that if I was trying to be fictional. And so everything flipped after that. We've seen a much more pugnacious tone from him. Talks have stalled, not even stalled. They're not happening. And so there really was a profound change before that it seemed like a damage

control mode. And after that, it's like gloves off and everyone's kind of gone to their corners. Andrew, you were the Director of Communications for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. So I need to understand when it comes to, you know, delivering messages and when all of this noise is happening, all the colorful languages being used, what do you do as a leader in terms of, and what should they be doing in terms of navigating the sort of the conversations that are happening right now? Well, I think the first thing you have to do is to realize the limitations of what anything you say can and might do. I think you're dealing with an opponent, President Trump, in this case, who is highly unorthodox and is not wedded to logic or reason. So that makes somebody as logical and reasonable, you know, reasonable is Mark Carney a very different foe. And I would just encourage any leader, you know, you have to realize the dynamic right now in Canada is such that people hate Donald Trump and are willing to give him the middle finger. And if you're not on that side of the equation, you're on the wrong side of the equation.

And I think Mark Carney has played to his brand and played it right. He is the guy that reminds people of what politics was like before idiots like Donald Trump showed up and made everything crazy. So you have to always stay on that side of the debate and let the Doug Fords and other premiers if they want, take a few of them more colorful punches. But I would tell Mark Carney and have written about Mark Carney saying, your brand proposition is the sanity in this debate because there's only sanity on one side. Well, as you said, Canadians seem to be on board with Carney's approach so far. An Angus Reid poll that came out Tuesday found that 76% say Canada was right to ditch the trade talks.

Stephen, you wrote in the New York Times recently that Mark Carney did what Canadians elected him to do. Does this issue go beyond partisan politics here? Oh, I think it definitely does. I mean, it's actually kind of a, it's a very difficult position for the conservatives to find themselves in, because we need a loyal opposition that is their job, but we're not at a moment where an opposition seems even possible, right? I mean, people talk about Carney's strategy here, but I really think there isn't much strategy, you know, to it.

I mean, to the previous point, like, you're not dealing with rational actors on the other side. They don't even have self-interest on their side. So that communication is pretty much irrelevant. And on the other side, the reason Ford and Carney are acting this way is that if they didn't, the Canadian people would reject them with great force, right? You know, I think, I think if Cardi had accepted that deal under those terms, it's possible his government wouldn't have even survived. So, you know, we're dealing in a very strange moment where strategy is

perhaps not even the right word for what we're in and what is required. Shannon, that same poll did find that a whole lot of people are scared about the rising costs, losing their jobs as well. Do you think Canadians are truly in this for the long haul? Yeah, there was another poll that came out in that sort of what I've come to think of as tariff limbo week. This one was from Abacus, but it had the same sort of opinions lining up next to each other where the vast majority of Canadians expected the new tariffs to hurt. The vast majority said it had already hurt their household, but an even bigger majority said, don't give an inch. And I think that in a tension that lives between those opinions is where people are. And that was a real problem.

Andrew, help me understand here, you know, how do politicians keep Canadians on side? Right now we talk about, we look at those numbers. It looks like, you know, they're trending in the right direction if you are Carney. But should politicians, what should they be doing here to keep Canadians on side as things perhaps get a bit more difficult when it comes to their wallets? Yeah, I think it's just keeping the greater context in mind. Right now, the number one thing Canadians want to see, Stephen was saying, is. is a tough position against Trump check. So we have a couple of months until the midterms.

So that I think is what you'll see. In the meantime, there are things that Kearney can and he's doing at home to try to show progress. So when he talks about his pitch buck and getting investment into some of these major economic projects across the country, whether it's going to the EU and saying we're going to do a bit more, you're showing this action of, we are consciously trying not to put all our eggs in that basket that we've relied on for most of everyone's lived experience in Canada. and that's not to say that these things will happen or happen quickly or have an effect that is greater than the potential loss from the United States. But that's all you can do and to show that you're active and busy on that. And as Stephen pointed out, the conservatives are in a horrible spot because the only constituency in Canada

doing any support for Donald Trump in his attitude to Canada sits on his side of the political equation. And that's not a place that you want to be. So Carney has the easier job, even though he's in control. and I'll sensibly face as the backlash. And that might not feel fair to the conservatives, but welcome to politics. I mean, so far, Trump has been doing a whole lot to keep Canadians united against him. There's Lake America, and there have been a few viral posts and memes. Here's a recent one from Trump showing him as a hockey player looming over, quote-unquote,

Governor Carney that we've all seen. And then there is Pete Higg-Seth, the United States Secretary of Defense. he posted an image mocking Canadian cadets. Stephen, Andrew was talking about, you know, being logical, having some reason. I can be very petty if I want to. I'm sure politicians probably are like, I can probably put, you know, get some AI images and fight back here. But how should politicians respond to that kind of attack? Oh, I think they, you know, the response to that kind of attack is actually totally irrelevant.

Like if you, you know, some people say Ford shouldn't have said things. Some people say he should. It really doesn't make any difference. What matters here is getting our trade diversification to the point where we're no longer under these people's thumb and getting our own house in order and moving away from America very quickly and understanding that, you know, the bus is going off the cliff and we need to jump out of the bus. And, you know, I think those things are actually moving forward with, you know, for Canadian. bureaucracy, remarkable alacrity, right? And so I think, you know, the actual taunting, like, I think you have to understand that as them not having a plan, right? Like, they don't actually have a plan for this trade war. They think, Trump thinks his response is calling Lake Ontario,

Lake America and punching and posting a bunch of AI slop. That's, when he's doing that, we need to be working. We need to be real busy right now getting out of the way of these people. Stephen, I want to stick with you. A lot of people here feel attacked, personally, of course, and it's not just economically. Has the U.S. Canada relationship been this tense before? Give me a little history lesson here. I don't think so. I mean, the last time you could compare it to, but I'm not sure it would actually be comparable,

is just before Confederation. When the Secretary of the Interior under Abraham Lincoln's administration, a note was leaked saying, we have armies, why don't we go take Canada. But that was a leak from a senior government figure, and it was never anything even remotely real. And that alone caused us to form our own country to put aside our own differences. I don't think there's ever been an American president,

you know, since the, you know, since the revolutionary period that's actively, or I guess the War of 1812, that's actively talked about conquering Canada and has an administration that, as, you know, put this into some kind of theoretical practice? Like, no, no, no. We're in completely unprecedented waters.

I mean, totally, without any precedent. Shannon, we're talking just before the 25th anniversary of 9-11. Back in 2001, in the aftermath of the tragedy, Canadians were proud and eager to help American neighbors. Like in Newfoundland, where so many people were stranded. It was, someone would say, a special bond. And I am curious, are we worried that that relationship will never recover. Do we think we will ever go back to where we were?

Well, I think to suggest we're worried about it is to suggest we don't have agency to decide what the relationship should be now, that we want to make up with them. I don't think that's where we are. I'm perhaps at risk of projecting here, but, you know, Americans, to be sure, only half of them, half of them are horrified just like the rest of the world, but half of them chose him for a second time. We don't know what's going to happen at a post-Trump era, but there's no reason to think. everything snaps back to normal. This is not sort of a blip. I don't think we should see it that way. And increasingly, I don't think we do. I would argue sort of the governing emotional tenor of 2025 was kind of shock and fear. There was this sense of great vulnerability of the Canadian

economy. There was some sort of threat that he was going to roll tanks or at least flatten us economically. And there was also just the profound shock of that to go from being, you know, special friends and neighbors, which is what we always speak of ourselves as being with the United States to something that aggressive out of nowhere. But that ship has sailed. I mean, Carney's been telling us that in a million different kind of rally speech phrases, you know, that it's a rupture, nostalgia is not a strategy. He has all these catchphrases, but there's a very real truth under there. Increasingly, every day that goes by every new outburst of insanity from the Americans, every new demonstration of their untrustworthiness, what would any trade deal be worth with them at this

point at all. They will just flip it on its head the next day. So again, there, I mean, there's a ton of chaos here. There's a ton of malevolence. Like, nothing in this situation is good, but there is the value of clarity for a country like Canada or maybe for others sort of watching from behind the curtains and watching to see how we're going to deal with it. Andrew, would a new administration change things? Wait a minute. I guess I'll give you the coward's answer. It depends what that administration looks like. Seriously, I think we come up on a couple of previous comments, I think we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In that, as Shannon said, while 77 some odd million Americans voted for Donald Trump, he didn't necessarily vote for him to pick fights with places like Canada. They have many different reasons. And when he worked in front-line politics, the first thing you learn is that most people don't know anything about the country or what they're voting on or the issues. And that's not to slight them.

It's just they're busy with their. lives and they have their pains and concerns and fears. And so I don't think we should assume that everybody supports what Donald Trump is doing. Now, I think the bigger limiting factor on all of this is just how completely poll acts our information space is right now. You know, the ability to have rational, thoughtful discussions on a canvas that can approach the national canvas is very difficult now. We live very digital-adomized lives where a lot of the information we see is, as Stephen's

point, AI slop, or other misinformation. And I think that makes coming together in empathy and understanding that much more difficult. So until we do something about that, politicians pulling on the levers that they have traditionally pulled on, they shouldn't expect to get the same kind of results. And I think that applies to bilateral relations. I think it applies to domestic policy. And that's why if I were back in government, that's what you have to work on. You know, Steve says get to work. You have to get to work bringing some sort of control and nationality around our information economy because it is a weird place right now. Stephen, according to polling from UGov America, 38% of Republicans view Canada is unfriendly

or an enemy to the U.S., by far the highest level in the past decade. Do you expect that number to rise? Well, it depends what Donald Trump wants to do with them. I mean, they're capable of being whipped into basically any frenzy that he demands of that, you know, that 38% base of the Republican Party. I do think finding enmity in Canada is actually probably so absurd that it's going to be a difficult cell. But, you know, I would just point out that, you know, I mean, obviously I wrote a book

called The Next Civil War. I'm a deep American pessimist. Like, I think the system and its inequality levels and its informational situations, you know, ecologies and all the rest of it are classic examples of societies headed for breakdown. down. I would just point out that there's zero evidence that a democratic administration that would follow this would be any more sensible or reasonable or pro-Canadian than what we're currently dealing with. I mean, you already hear governors of California, Abdullah-Said, saying things like, well, I'm not going to take off the tariffs, but, you know, this is ridiculous,

this fight. We need to understand that it is the American political system writ large that has become toxic and become, you know, fundamentally unsustainable and dysfunctional. And that that is not going anywhere. Donald Trump is very much just a symptom of that collapse rather than even maybe a catalyst of it, but certainly not a cause. Shannon, is this trade war and everything that goes with it revealing anything about our national character? I happen to be working on a story about that right now, so I hope my thoughts make sense.

Well, we infamously, right, and sort of self-flagellating, we say that we often define ourselves in opposition to what we are not. We are not Americans. We have socialized medicine. We do things differently here. I almost wonder if it has sharpened our sense of self and our sense of patriotism in an outward-facing way in that, you know, a lot of the kind of joking, but I still think revealing commentary in the early days was, oh, the American administration is so obnoxious. they've made the Canadians angry, like the stuffies have taken up arms against them. We know that's not who we are. We know it's not actually that surprising that we've shown a lot of grit, even spite, that

people have this resolve. I mean, when you're a small country living next door to a behemoth, you have to have a quiet sense of self. This has been enormously galvanizing that had cooled off, I think, pretty demonstrably, you know, say over the six months or so before the latest round of tariffs. People just can't sustain a nine out of ten level of crisis response as things sort of normalized. Like Donald Trump went from being an air raid siren to sort of a case of tinnitus. But this has revved all that up again.

People, I think, are very much in a mood to do what they can. And if that's, you know, running their grocery cart through an app that tells them how Canadian it all is or vacationing at home or whatever form that takes, booing the anthem at sporting events, it's a very all-in thing. The question is sort of what happens from here in a more mechanical way. How much damage does the Canadian economy sustain? How much worse does this get? This is a classic arms rate. And what the Canadian public has appetite for and what the Canadian government starts to feel is necessary or prudent in a policy sense.

Because I think at some point those two things are going to become disaggregated. Right now they're very happily married. But that's going to get harder as time wears a lot. We still got two more years of this guy. And to the point of my fellow panelists, this is not going back. There's no rewind button on this to some degree. Sure, he is a unique character, we hope, in world history forever and ever all men. But there is, the American political system has gone to septic.

And the rest of the world has to live with it from now. Time will tell. Shannon, Stephen, Andrew, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. Have your feelings about the U.S. changed, and what would it take to change them back? Let us know when the first, comments or send us an email to rundown at tvo.org. I'm Jay and Jaggonon. Thanks for watching the rundown. I will see you next week. If your social feed is suddenly full of political

hot takes, you know, events matter, campaigns matter. If your group chat has opinions about bike lanes, housing, or city hall, you may not like the decision. You may like the decision, whatever. And if you've ever wondered, wait, what's actually going on? We've got you covered. Welcome everyone to the On Poly Podcast. This fall, the On Poly Podcast, it's Steve Paken and John Michael McGrath returns with the story shaping Ontario. The money comes from the province and that comes with strings. From Queens Park to municipal elections happening across the province, smart analysis, great conversations, no political science degree required.

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